Rossi: Repeal Wall St. reform legislation

Republican Senate candidate Dino Rossi said Tuesday he wants to repeal recently-passed legislation that sought to provide greater oversight of Wall Street in the wake of the economic collapse.

Rossi, who is running against Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, has previously said he wants to repeal the health care reform legislation Democrats previously passed.

The new financial law would create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau inside the Federal Reserve that could write new rules to protect consumers from unfair credit card and mortgage practices.

It also creates a new council of regulators that would set standards for how much cash banks must keep on hand to prevent them from triggering a financial crisis. And it would put limits on Wall Street banks’ ability to speculate for their own accounts and their ability to own hedge funds.

“The cost — the $500 billion tax increase alone cost the Boeing Co. in my state $150 million. But if you replicate that across the state of Washington, there’s tens of thousands of jobs that’ll be lost or won’t be created because of Patty Murray’s 60th and deciding vote. We shouldn’t be trying to kill jobs in our state right now.”

Asked if he would also would press to repeal the Wall Street reform bill, Rossi said:

“I think we should. I think we should put reforms in that actually protect the public and don’t reduce the amount of money that small businesses have available to them to grow, because 64 percent of job creation since ’92 came from small businesses, and now, we’re just killing them.”

Julie Edwards, Murray’s campaign spokeswoman, said Rossi’s views on the Wall Street bill are “an extreme position that’s out of step with Washington state.”